I was never clear on this. The implication toward the end of the series was that we never encountered aliens when expanding into the galaxy because of something the robot Daneelwas doing to put them out of the way to protect man.
What was he doing to neutralize them? Genocide?
As I mis-remembering or is this the case?
Wasn’t time travel involved? Didn’t it end up tying in with his novel From Here to Eternity?
Misremembering a bit.
“The End of Eternity” dealt with why there weren’t any aliens in the Milky Way Galaxy. But due to time travel hijinks, it mostly takes place in a parallel universe. R Daneel Olivaw had nothing to do with it.
Daneel was dealing with a related problem. Other galaxies don’t have this problem of only one sentient race. So they have 2 or more strong sentient species vying for supremacy. But as soon as one gains control, the next move for several of them is to expand to other galaxies, including our own. But this process takes time, which is why humanity has been able to spread to the rest of the galaxy in the mean time. An eventual invasion is treated as a foregone conclusion in the Foundation books.
Daneel’s solution is to unify humanity and get it prepared for any such incursion, strongly implying he was instrumental in establishing and preserving the first Galactic Empire. He’s basically doing what he can to get humanity ready for the inevitable conflict. That would involve preventing humanity from diminishing its own strength through internal squabbles and descents into barbarism.
Asimov was reportedly stuck trying to think of a way to begin writing about this conflict towards the end of his life and never came up with a satisfactory way of doing it.
In the authorized sequels by Brin, Benford and Bear, the robots spread through the galaxy ahead of the colonizing humans, destroying alien civilizations, and leaving planets ready for cultivation. The humans were manipulated by the robots such that no one thought much about the fact then whenever they got to a planet, they found that it was unoccupied, but ready for occupation.
Damn!
Did the robots ever stumble on to a negative-first law here? (I.e., don’t harm sentience, or something like that?)
Yes - some of them did (but some stuck to the original three laws, and some stuck to the 0th and first three) Three Laws of Robotics - Wikipedia
I had understood that what Daneel was doing wasn’t precisely genocide, but rather tweaking their history through time-travel shenanigans such that they never arose to begin with.
And I don’t recall anything in The End of Eternity that had anything to do with preventing alien civilizations-- I think that’s just shoehorned in by folks (Asimov himself possibly included) trying to force it into the same continuity as Foundation.
In The End of Eternity, the far future Men found that other civilizations had arose around the Galaxy and surpassed Man. In the FAR FAR FUTURE, Man had ceased to exist, at least, not on Earth. So, they blocked certain years (I always presumed they were not just their own years but also involved First Contact and the Decline of Man) and set out to change History so that interSTELLAR, not just interplanetary, travel would happen.
That changed everything and set up the Empire/Foundation time stream. So, imho, the novel is linked to the Empire.
I have never read any post Asimov books
Interesting.
I always wished Daneel would see the wisdom of encouraging interstellar democracy and not near-absolute monarchism.
Debatable. The problem with absolute monarchism is that the monarch isn’t always good, and even if he is, he’s mortal, and his successor might not be. But when you’ve got an immortal and supremely moral monarch, those problems go away.
And even if you argue that Daneel isn’t supremely moral, he’s obviously not going to agree with you, so from his perspective, it still makes sense for him to remain in power.
Heh. I was actually thinking of the everyone-can-see-it human form of government, not of R. Daneel’s behind-the-scenes string-pulling. But you make a good point.
This is precisely what I thought I had remembered as well.
Not just the time travel stuff. Giscard had taught Daneel how to read Human minds, didn’t he? Back in the Elijah days.
I think the implication was that the Empire’s bureaucrats were the real power. Aside from which, it was basically stable and reasonably free for as it was - which was more than enough to satisfy the Robots.
More importantly, from their perspective, there’s no inherent value to democracy or participatory forms of government. What’s the difference to them, after all, between one human claiming to make the rules or a few hundred? From the perspective of someone outside humanity the difference between forms of government probably look trivial and ridiculous, more a tribute to human capacity for self-delusion than practical problem-solving.